Libra: The Global Mega-Corp Currency

Check this out lainons https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/ >backed by fuarrrking everyone visa, mastercard, paypal, stripe, facebook, uber, booking holdings, spotify, ebay, vodafone, iliad.... >"validator nodes" can only be run by association members although they claim to change that by letting anyone run validator nodes 5~ years after the blockchain goes live >association is run by a council where representatives are sent by validator node owners >the majority of association members are corporations >the currency is backed with real life assets They aim to release this by the first half of 2020. It looks like we will go full cryberpunk in around a year or so.

>"validator nodes" can only be run by association members Just another example of authorities taking something distributed and making a centralized version for their own gain. I hope to god it doesn't catch on. But it probably will because they've got the social influence to push it onto everyone.

>>17799 My feeling about it is a tad mixed. On one side, it allows pseudonymous usage by design and by the magic of promises, but it's ratty Corps™ we are talking about. But the whole 5 year period where they'll gradually close it down to the public ability to run nodes, is.... Well, a red flag for me. A serious red flag. But the fact that this all throws the advantages proper open-blockchain has out of the window, it's just another payment method for normal people if it catches on and might be slightly undesired by the public due to the fluctuation it can have and generally conversion from the 'Libra' coin to standard currencies in our world. Even if it's backed by real life assets, it will still offer a inconvenience for adopters with no experience, so it's either gonna take a lot of idiot-testing and proper documentation to get this done for the masses. Best case scenario if this gets released, it will get hype for a month or two by the masses because 'facebook-coin omg' and then fizzle out as they realize it's not adopted yet by the places you'd spend your money. The issue with adaptation of such currency for the masses these days is that it isn't something filling a hole, at least where I live. But I noticed in their whitepaper that they primarily focus towards places with less financial infrastructure, hell they start off with that in their whitepaper. >But the existing blockchain systems have yet to reach mainstream adoption. Mass-market usage of existing blockchains and cryptocurrencies has been hindered by their volatility and lack of scalability, which have, so far, made them poor stores of value and mediums of exchange. >Some projects have also aimed to disrupt the existing system and bypass regulation as opposed to innovating on compliance and regulatory fronts to improve the effectiveness of anti-money laundering. Honestly, this kind of amuses me to read. Sound like some real finance-boomer talk. I am gonna stick with >>17802 and hope it doesn't catch on. But can we discuss how this might be used to our adventage must it get to a point of mass-adoptation? Since it also has some aspects of it that can be easily used to get stuff done that might've not been possible before, even if it's not a full open-blockchain.

>>17799 Basically just cutting the card companies out of the consumer transaction history infosale loop.

>>17799 It's centralized trash. We already have bitcoin which is much more cyberpunk than anything Zuck can dream up.

>>17805 I duunoooo, adding an evil, massive, monopolous megacorp of satan to the mix is pretty cyberpunk. But the pessimist in me wonders if this was always the destiny of cryptocurrency. Although it's decentralized and tamper-resistant by nature internally as a software and a mathematical concept, its hardware still exists in meatspace--and its ideals are upheld by meatsacks, nothing stopping some other org from making a bastardized version and using pre-existing power structures to boost it far beyond organic crypto--so centralization can still be brought in from outside. True decentralized crypto will probably always still exist, but hey--there's still a lot of fax machines running out there too. If a major player makes a soykafcoin and it becomes ultra-mainstream due to some nasty-ass platform integration, the real stuff will have an even harder time gaining further traction. We made some powerful tools for banks and monopolists to pervert and use to obfuscate and reinforce their own power. It was only a matter of time before somebody with enormous assets subjected it to serious abuse. FB, google, and several telecoms should be eliminated from the earth. I don't think many people realize just how much of a fuarrrkshow this could all become following their capture of several more future black-swan technologies. We're going to live to regret letting all this develop the way it has.

Some nut made a hard-fork of the Libra project in protest of this corporal bastardization of a cryptocurrency. Fantastic. https://github.com/miohtama/libra-classic

at least its good for the ecosystem I guess. from: https://hackernoon.com/libra-a-cyberpunk-nightmare-in-the-midst-of-crypto-spring-5543b6f6e34b It seems like the the association gets to keep all the interest for themselves and you need to go through rigorous know your customer to even begin using it calibra.

>>17838 "panopticon money" is a surprisingly fitting term, the article raises some very crucial point thank you very much for linking it lainon

>>17838 I read that article too. I'm skeptical that it's necessarily going to be good for the ecosystem--only time will tell I suppose, but I'd rather prefer that time did not tell and this thing died in the crib. The guy who wrote that article also seems to kind of swing back and forth between pessimism and optimism. If the first massively mainstream platform-backed coin seizes way more market share than bitcoin et. al. ever had, then it might have an eclipsing effect. Introducing a massively overpowered apex predator to an ecosystem isn't automatically good for the system. I think crypto always had a tendency towards becoming panopticon money. Almost all digital innovation tends towards that effect. I think we as a society need to stop thinking that digital innovation is the only path towards new solutions. There are other ways, and our innovations have almost all blown up in our faces lately.

It's fuarrrked up. The good thing is that the big banks are soykafting themselves in fear, the bad thing is that we are too. Zucc is really attempting to centralize all of the world's money, his ideal result with this new venture would be for Libra to become the one and only currency. I can completely imagine the youth falling for this soykaf, using Libra to pay their streaming services and buy stuff off Amazon, not so much older people. Besides, since the governments are naturally against this, it won't become as spread out as they want, at least not soon. But, sadly, I don't think it will die, especially with all those big names backing it up. It'll have a slow start, but a start nonetheless.

>>17844 what i've heard their target market is india, especially poorer parts with bad infrastructure. so i don't think you need to worry about widespread use, not yet anyway.

>>17811 Personally, I don't see any point in stablecoins like LIbra, like usd is already basically a digital currency since over 90% of it doesn't even exist as paper. Why would anyone care for Libra?

>>17858 Mainly because it lets them steal your interest and further concentrates financial power in the hands of its owners. It's a step towards money non-ownership, where currency becomes no more than a pure method of exchange that common people can't invest and use to build their own wealth and gain social mobility. Pretty similar to company scrip--and many of these tech robber barons are even experimenting with company housing/"dog kennel apartments" en masse over in the bay area, and around the world in the form of wework. Welcome back to the tenement era. Everything old is new again. We're about to get a harsh reminder of why it's important to maintain strong labor power. We need to start treating tech and knowledge economy stuff for what it really is: the main pillar of the US middle class of our current time. We still have images of auto factory workers and coal miners echoing in our imagination, but right now we have basically service/gig economy lower classes, knowledge economy/tech worker middle class, and the ownership class--which has never changed. The regressive labor culture of our new middle class is going to make us all serfs if it keeps this up. "Traditional" money already has lots of structural schemes and grifts that let it steal interest from its rightful holders, and this adds yet another layer. The end goal presumably being that you get to accumulate more wealth by virtue of the wealth you already have ONLY if you belong to a specific caste of people. That's basically been the case for the lower class all along, but ideas like these will reinforce that and move it further up the class ladder. Think of it kind of like the way software has gone from something you own to something you lease from a company who has total control over it through a completely opaque TOS that they change twice a month. Why would any actual users care for libra? Good fuarrrking question. Why do people care for the utter stinking landfill that is facebook already? Remember--when they talk about the convenience of a new technology, question who it is that it's convenient for.

>>17804 this. also, why should i trust zuck with my money? >>17805 also this. there are way better coins around. if one wants centralized for whatever reason, get XRP. >>17811 >I duunoooo, adding an evil, massive, monopolous megacorp of satan to the mix is pretty cyberpunk. it is, but for the sake of larping, i would never support it. paypal is enough in my book and they just transfer money, at least in my use case. >>17848 >what i've heard their target market is india, especially poorer parts with bad infrastructure. so i don't think you need to worry about widespread use, not yet anyway. two years ago i discussed the possibility of creating a blockchain currency to fight corruption and poverty in the third world with a friend. we brainstormed some elaborated ideas, but dropped it since we does not have the time to to this and trust in cryptos is still not here for such a project. maybe in 20 years time.

>let us create a private bank for you without all the obligations of a private bank Reminds of how paypal frequently eats up people's money. This soykaf can only be worse.

Anything that Facebook backs up I'm already disgusted

>>17848 This actually sounds way more scary. Poor people have way less alternatives and if an entire quickly growing ends up only using this soykaf and never knowing anything else nobody will be able to replace it in the future and it will only spread to the rest of the world.

>>18463 >>18463 >>18463 Exactly. Why in the holy dogshit dildos would anyone trust zucc and his awful website with literally anything anymore? Let alone an incredibly powerful, untested global financial system. They've proven several times that they can't resist corruption and invasion. It's like a tropism for them. Would you expect a plant not to grow towards the sun? No. If you do, then you are the fool. People have lost they damn minds. Hell. No. >>18504 Also yes. Using this to ensnare desperately poor yet rapidly growing countries in the global south is despicable. It's like some kind of bizarre digital colonialism. You know they're drooling venom in jealousy over all the evil that bankers are able to do, and they want part of that action. And they want to hook it up to their awful surveillance machine, too. They'll blend two turds together into something more nasty than either on its own. This shouldn't even require thought or discussion: it's facebook. Whatever they do is 100% solid garbage. Period. They oughta be marched into the sea and drowned en masse.

>>17844 I bet governments would be fine with it, especially ones where the border between business and the government is blurry. As long as the federal reserves can have a finger in it I bet it would be adopted. Murka adopted for-profit prisons, why wouldn't they adopt a soykafcoin?

>>18518 zucc wants a piece of that third world pie before china gets it. Imagine facebook becoming the new East India Company with its own military and currency.

>>18533 And people say cyberpunk is dead. We're living the dream!